Violence

Throughout the novel, the author uses both Joan’s encounters with violence in the past and her perpetual feelings of violence in the present in order to examine gender-based violence and innate female rage. The author establishes these thematic interests within the opening paragraph of Chapter 1. Indeed, the novel begins with Joan saying: “I drove myself out of New York City where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig. That’s a cruel thing to think, I know. He did it in a restaurant where I was having dinner with another man, another married man. Do you see how this is going? But I wasn’t always that way” (1, Taddeo’s italics). By opening the novel with this gruesome imagery, the author infuses the narrative atmosphere...